


Love Doesn't Come Easy

by alixcat



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, all the m9 are mentioned but really its just essek being broody about emotions, fan children hinted at in the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24884851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alixcat/pseuds/alixcat
Summary: Love isn't something the Shadowhand is all that well versed in.
Relationships: Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 5
Kudos: 69





	Love Doesn't Come Easy

Essek didn’t… _love_. 

Not because he didn’t want to, though that probably was part of it. He simply never had a reason to. He had his responsibilities to fulfill and his reputation to maintain. He had his job, he had his den, and he had his towers.

Love was a risk, and love made you weak. Letting down your walls for one person weakens them for everyone. There isn’t any need for love when you deal with politics. It bogs you down and becomes a distraction. And when you can only guess at who wants to see you gone, the last thing you need is someone to make it easier to pull you down.

Essek didn’t love. 

He didn’t see the need in it. The squishy feelings that everyone said came with it, the nausea that took control whenever you saw them smile. It sounded infuriating. How could you even want to love someone when being with them made you feel sick?

He saw how others loved. Saw how they cherished their lover’s company, reveled in the beauty of their spouse’s presence. He didn’t judge them for it. It just wasn’t for him. 

Essek didn’t know love. 

Maybe it was because he never knew what it felt like to receive it. As much as he didn’t see the need to feel love, his parents never saw the need to show it either. You did what you were expected to and received the amount of praise you deserved. 

Caring for each other, especially before you can be certain you have passed the threshold for anamnesis, is only a burden. There are better things to spend your time on than fawning over someone that only has a task to fulfill. Maybe that was heartless, but it was what he knew. 

Essek didn’t think he loved. 

He understood love better now, though, working with the Mighty Nein. He saw how their love wasn’t bound by romance or attraction. Just being kind and giving up their time for one another was a form of love in and of itself. Risking everything just to make sure one of them was safe from the clutches of evil. He wondered what it was like to care for someone like that. 

He hadn’t ever thought of love as amorphous, merging between the people you cared about. He never considered the shapeless quality it possessed when you learned to give it freely. Jester especially became a shining beacon of loving without cause and what it truly meant. He started to gain an appreciation for love. 

Essek tried not to love. 

If he kept telling himself this wasn’t love, maybe soon he would start to believe it. He just couldn’t help but get caught up in the euphoria of a mission well done, a task completed. Happiness shared around a mess of a table, covered in food and alcohol and whatever that day’s loot had been. The Mighty Nein had become fond of him, and maybe he was starting to grow fond of them too. Just maybe. 

But it still felt… distant. Like he was borrowing something that wasn’t his own. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it wouldn’t last long.

Essek wished he hadn’t loved.

He had known it was risky, letting his guard down and befriending the ragtag group, but he couldn’t help himself. They were so endearing, so exquisite, so _charming_. He wasn’t supposed to be charmed by people. That was part of what made him so invaluable to the Bright Queen. He wasn’t supposed to feel these trivial things that others did.

But he had been charmed. He had learned to care for them, learned to trust them, learned to be willing to love them. Then, just as he did, it all came crumbling down around him, torn to shreds by the things he had done. 

Essek had known love.

And now he knew heartbreak. He knew what it was like to be willing to throw yourself on the pyre for someone, only for them to say: _I don’t want you_. And he couldn’t blame them, because what was it he was really giving up in the first place? He’d just be getting rid of an opportunity for them to make him pay. No matter what, it ended with him running, trying to hide from a fate that was inescapable. 

He had betrayed his home, yes. But worse than that, he betrayed their trust. He wanted nothing more than to go back to how things were, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. They had every right to hate him, to not love him. He couldn’t blame them. 

So he blamed himself and went back to not loving. 

Essek thought he knew love.

He thought he knew the ways that it could change, fold, shift. All the ways it could fit into the cracks of a broken family, made of broken people just trying to find someone that thought they were worth it. He understood that. He knew it could set in stone things that would be unchangeable for the rest of time.  
What he hadn’t considered was that love healed. Love grew. Love was willing to move forward with you, broken pieces and all, to turn you whole again. All love asked was that you would help fit the puzzle back together again.

And so he did.

Essek found love. 

He found it in the way Jester giggled when he got frosting on his ears while baking. He found it in the bruises left from Beau’s punches. He found it in the scolding reprimands Veth would give him whenever he started acting too shifty for her comfort (which was quite often, he learned). He found it in the morning teas he shared with Caduceus. He found it in the flowers Yasha would show him in her book. He found it in the yells from Fjord whenever he drifted too far from the group while adventuring. He found it in the stories he heard of Mollymauk, and how he taught them what it was to love like he had. Most of all, he found it in the quiet moments with Caleb as they studied together, the space between them an ocean wide yet still less than a hair’s width apart. 

Essek fostered love.

In those silent moments, those moments that were his own, he tried to understand. He wanted to love them. He wanted to care for them. He wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of his life within this crazy family of broken people that somehow mended each other along the way. He knew he had broken their hearts tenfold of what he had felt. They had felt loss in many ways, ways he couldn’t begin to imagine, but what he did must have been some of the worst. And he hated that. 

So, he worked to fix it. 

Maybe he was being selfish. The thought did occur to him. What if he only wanted to love them because then they could heal him? He couldn’t bear the thought of hurting them like that again.

Maybe that’s what love was.

Essek grew in love.

He didn’t seek out their love, or their kindness, he simply worked to make amends. But still he found that the Mighty Nein were willing to love him again, a gift he could never be more thankful for. He learned what it was that they stood for, the things they built their morals upon. Some of them even he was dubious of, but he didn’t dismiss or argue. 

He showed them that he had love to give too. It wasn’t neat like their love was, and sometimes it came out in a mess of words that didn’t make sense. But it was his love nonetheless. 

Essek loved having love.

He flourished in it. He found peace in it. It was messy, and rough around the edges, but it was like him. There wasn’t any easy way to go about it, but once you started there was no going back. It was comforting and felt like… home. 

That was another thing he was learning. Feeling at home. His towers had been a house, his place of residence, but never his _home_. When he was with the Mighty Nein, that changed. Now, anywhere he went was home.

Essek was confused by love. 

It wasn’t that the concept hadn’t crossed his mind a thousand times before. He most certainly wouldn’t say that he knew when it started or what had started it. There wasn’t even a single moment he could pin down as the instant he realized it existed. It just… was.

This love was different from the other one. 

This love had fiery orange hair that never seemed to stay managed. This love had blue eyes that could melt away into the oceans blue, a comparison he only recently had managed to truly understand. This love was passionate. Excitable. This love was kind and caring, but determined and ruthless. This love chose what it wanted and stuck to it, holding on for dear life until it cost it everything and then some.

And he couldn’t get enough of it.

Essek came to terms with love.

He found peace in it. He found joy. Hope. Enthusiasm. He found courage. Strength. Compassion. He found a new way of living that actually let him _live_. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to care about someone.

He showed this love freely. It took time, and more often than not something got in the way of him sounding as elegant as he would have liked. But that was also part of love; letting go of that perfect him.

Essek didn’t need love.

It was a risk. It was pointless. It made you weak. It created liabilities and responsibilities. It was a nasty mess of emotions that complicated everything. It gave an easy in to those that wanted to see you harmed.

You get butterflies when you see your husband smile. You can’t think straight when your daughter lets out her first tiny giggle. You get distracted when you see your son take his first steps. 

Essek didn’t need love.

But yet, how he loved.

**Author's Note:**

> The daughter and son mentioned are Una and Molly, fan kids of Essek and Caleb, from the Essek discord.


End file.
